Daniel Nohrstedt research projects

This project aims to compare counter-terrorism policy developments at the Member State level within the EU in the post-9/11 era. Most previous work on this topic has focused on the policy response at the EU level while only a few studies have been conducted on national policy developments. In an effort to bridge this gap, this project compares counter-terrorism policy in all 27 EU Member States between 2000 and 2006. In a first step, it focuses the attention to implementation of counter-terrorism policy instruments in these states. Data obtained from the EU Committee of Experts on Terrorism (CODEXTER) and UN Counter-terrorism Committee (CTC)  shows that the policies of the Member States have developed according to very different trajectories in terms of pace and the level of implementation of policy instruments. In the next step, a comparative case-study will be conducted in order to study the causal factors that help explaining these variations.

Crisis, learning and reform

For quite some time, the relationship between crises and processes of learning and reform has received much attention in the social science literature. Neo-institutional theory suggests, for instance, that policies are likely to remain stable over time and will only change dramatically when a crisis or some other punctuation occurs. In Kingdonian terms, such events oftentimes open up ‘windows of opportunity’ to carry out non-incremental policy reform. The reality is more complex, however, and history shows that the prospects for learning and reform vary considerably. Against this background, this project studies the relationship between crisis, learning and reform more closely. It seeks to develop a theoretical framework to study this relationship more closely, by drawing upon insights from political science, public administration, public policy, political psychology, and crisis management research. Empirically, the project combines systematic large-n studies of cases from the CRISMART case-bank  as well as indepth examination of single cases.

The Advocacy Coalition Framework

Since the late 1980’s, Paul Sabatier’s Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) has been one of the most widely cited theories in the study of change and learning in the policy process. At present, about 40 cases from around the world have applied the ACF to a variety of different policy issues. By stressing the importance of ‘external shocks’ as important triggers for policy change, the ACF has been used quite frequently as an inspiration for crisis scholars. This project contributes to the cumulative effort to develop the ACF by using this theory to explain developments in Swedish nuclear energy policy. By combining different analytical methods, studies have been conducted on the Swedish policy response to the 1979 Three Mile Island accident (Nohrstedt 2005) and the 1986 Chernobyl crisis (Nohrstedt 2008). The next step is to draw more general implications from these studies in order to contribute to the generalizability of the ACF.